I want to start a noob support community, what do? Also, does anyone want to participate?

@archsimkat said in I want to start a noob support community, what do? Also, does anyone want to participate?:

Right now there are the <300 and <800 meetup channels on Discord, which are meant to be a place for noobs to find games and have discussion, but are "locked" behind reacting to a role, which most noobs probably won't do. As a result those channels are pretty dead. I think a simple change would be adding a new channel on Discord for noobs to find games and have discussion, so if there aren't any objections I could do that at some point.

No the issue is that there aren’t enough new players at any given point on the Discord to organize said games. The point of these channels being locked by rating is that you can’t ping roles for 1v1, 2v2, big teamgames, modded games, etc without pinging all 18,000 players on the Discord that put those roles. I don’t think Tagada wants to be pinged by an American 200 to play a 1v1 at 2 am.

Better solution is to actually make the react channel mandatory to go through prior to entering the rest of the Discord same as other communities do. Can also loosen the rating brackets so that there are more people in each category. Currently it is 5, could make it 3.

I’d also say this thread is mixing up a few things. @Jip says the campaign is a great introduction to the tools of the game but it isn’t. The feedback loops of the campaign very specifically encourage you to play in a 20 minute no rush style and is probably the reason why that sort of gameplay is so prevalent in lower rated lobbies. I know when I finished the campaign all my skirmishes against AI were with no rush because it’s just how the campaign taught me the pace of the game.

In terms of actually grabbing players the campaign is fine since people with no experience like the stress free style of pve but this thread is already written under the presumption of using pvp as an introduction for new players.

FAF made missions also don’t really improve on this beyond the point of making missions auto expand at some intervals. Many times they make even heavier attacks happen at expansions which encourage you to abuse the time for free development as much as possible. Several others induce difficulty by making you do things like fight monkeylords when the strongest unit you can make is a pillar.

There really does need to be less of a giant gap in user experience between pvp and pve on FAF.

The biggest problem is:

People want to get good at team games by playing team games

But the way to get good is through playing 1v1s with conscious effort directed towards analyzing replays and taking feedback from better players, especially (if you can get it) feedback from top players

How do we create a team game environment that teaches people how to get good at team games? Probably, we can't. Maybe we need Rimworld-style tutorials that assess what is going on in the player's game in order to offer targeted advice as the game goes on. So the game would point out basically "hey dude, your economy is grossly unbalanced" or "bro, you're power stalling and you're not taking this reclaim in front of you" or "don't put storages on t1 mexes" or "you shouldn't put pgens around more than 2 of your t1 mexes" "this e storage thing you're doing is abominated" etc.

@arma473 easy: host mixed rating game, coach the noob on your team taking time to type, die early due to typing all the time, then coach full time

@phong u do this great, we have won games just because of your coaching. I think if more people played like that we could have a much better new player environment

What? You need to play 1v1 to be good at teamgames? Somebody should tell Yudi, BH, and Farm who all got 2k in teamgames before even beginning to care about ladder.

@spikeynoob I'm willing to share my secret die-fast techniques if you're willing to consider hosting all welcome every now and then haha

I would like to point out that this is actually a vital post.^^

There're a bunch of newbies out there that could use any kind of help,maybe some short eco videos or some examples of situations to make it interactive, i know that the trainer team is working on developing any means of helping as well, could also suggest to get some short tutorials up and perhaps integrate them in the launcher.

good to know there is progress in this direction

As I said, there are plenty of people already doing good work training noobs, and more tutorial videos would be nice. What I wanted to focus on was making sure that new players have a higher chance of naturally interacting with a helpful veteran as fast as possible, before they potentially sour on the faf experience, without jumping through any discord or forum hoops. Until the matchmaker becomes the clear default, I think more of a presence of such helpful veterans on the custom lobby list could do this, since, as Deribus said, the noobs themselves are saying that finding games is difficult, in spite of the fact they can host themselves, and in spite of the fact that the matchmaker's available 24/7, but only populated half the time.

Some people don't mind having noobs in their lobbies or they wouldn't join my games. Some of them host themselves, but maybe the noobs that know me don't know them so they are less likely to join. But then there might be other people I haven't even met or barely interacted with, playing in a different timezone or not fluent in English. I was hoping we could organize into a community and maybe sway other people to give "noobs welcome" a try with this goal in mind.

Maybe there's something I could do to get more noobs to join my lobbies I haven't even thought of and one of you suggests it. Many noobs are under the false impression that joining a game with any veterans in it will be a bad experience, when in fact, it can be quite fun. What could I do to change that perception?

How about: a game mode where the match is unrated for the single highest rated player on each side but not the others, so they could just concentrate on helping and instructing and not worry too much about their own performance or rating hit.

This would help new players get their rating established and learn the game, could limit it to players below certain number of players / games except for the coaches

You can already accomplish that by having high rated players be observers in a game.

@black_wriggler hey that sounds interesting i'll give it a try
Edit: tried it in 1v1 format, was quite fun, if i get a chance i want to try 2v2 as well. we called it Minions & Masters after the tournament

isn't it a bit broken if masters can see the whole map as observers?

Phong wasn't using observers, the 'masters' went in as teammates and ctrl+k'd at the start

Just send them to the streamers.

can also join the same army (player) with cheat mode alft+f2 and basically see all of the available info

Shared unit army is also a thing

One thing, I like to suggest when we have a new player joining us is to play in decapitation. Losing your acu is less stressful and it allows the new player to play his acu instead of leaving it in his base.

@yojih I downloaded the mod and will give it a try